The biggest enchilada

By William Langley

12:01AM BST 08 Jul 2007

The statisticians were all over Carlos Slim Helu last week, and it didn't take them long to figure out what his $67.8 billion fortune could buy; a stack of tortillas stretching to Neptune, every government since independence, more gold than the Aztecs lost. This is how it is with serious money. You think you own it, but it ends up owning you.

The portly, 67-year-old mogul maintains a discreet presence in a country where the average wage is around £10 a day. His emergence as the world's richest man therefore did little for his mood.

At a recent press conference Slim, as he likes to be known, sat glumly while people demanded to know, not how he had made all his money but how he was going to give it away. After a while he stubbed out his trademark cigar, declared that he wasn't Santa Claus, and left.

Sadly, there is nowhere for Slim to escape to. Like his predecessor, Bill Gates of Microsoft, he will learn that the title is all trouble.

From now on he will be a symbol of the wretchedness of excess, a measure of all the heart-rending inequalities of the world, and a sitting duck for Thoreau's observation that philanthropy is the only virtue mankind knows how to appreciate.

Gates founded a software company. It isn't much of an exaggeration to say that Slim owns an entire country.

Let's take your average Jose, a working stiff with a house and a family to support, and see how his pesos pour like the water from a Plaza Zocalo fountain into Slim's appreciative paws.

Our man wakes up in the morning swaddled in bedding from one of Slim's department stores, breakfasts on pastries from his bakery chain, drives to work on roads built by his construction company in a car covered by his insurance company; spends the day using phones and internet services provided by Slim's near-monopolistic telecoms division, and after supper in one of the tycoon's innumerable chain cantinas goes home to watch the news on a TV channel owned by… guess who?

Poor Jose, like most of his fellow citizens he isn't sure what to make of the big enchilada.

On the one hand, it can be considered a a matter of national pride that Mexico, a country with a per-capita GDP only slightly above that of Equatorial Guinea, has produced the world's most successful businessman.

On the other, there has long been a suspicion of something shady about Slim; a sense that such wealth, power and ubiquity can only have been built through the skilled manipulation of a notoriously corrupt establishment.

And there is something else. A problematic issue that, to some extent, draws both lines of thought together.

Slim isn't - at least in the eyes of many Mexicans - a proper Mexican at all. He was born to Lebanese immigrant parents who arrived in the early 20th century with a wave of Levantine Christians fleeing the Ottoman Empire.

The Mexican-Lebanese community now numbers around 400,000 but punches way above its weight in commerce, and its success in a country where millions struggle to make it through the day has not gone unresented.

The Lebanese are politely described as "close knit", meaning that they have a preference for dealing with each other, at the expense, as some appear to see it, of the greater good.

Slim's father, Julian, ran a Mexico City grocery store, the Star of the Orient, later investing in residential property, and by the time Slim, the youngest of his six children, left school, was a moderately wealthy man.

Today, Slim strategically plays down his Lebanese provenance. "I've only been there once in my life," he says, "and the only Arabic I know is swear words."

Not that he has much to curse about. From a privileged upbringing and an elite university education he moved smoothly into business, swooping with deadly accuracy on a bombed-out economy left smouldering by successive peso crises.

By the 1980s, he had already assembled a mini-conglomerate of outwardly disparate businesses ranging from tobacco to auto-parts that only had one thing in common. "I got them cheap," Slim explained.

Fiendishly handsome in his youth, he married Soumaya Gemayel, the daughter of a prominent Lebanese Maronite family, who died eight years ago from kidney disease.

A Mexico City museum set up in Soumaya's name now houses Slim's art collection, and three of their six children now run divisions of the family business.

The big breakthrough came in 1990 when the Mexican government, ablaze with Thatcherite zeal, put its state-owned telecoms monopoly, Telmex, up for sale. A consortium controlled by Slim won the auction with a bid of $1.76 billion, despite howls of protest from the unions and Left-wing opposition parties.

Today, the business is worth more than $30 billion, and sits at the heart of a vast commercial empire that employs more than 250,000 people and accounts for almost half the capitalisation of the Mexican stock exchange.

In this sense, Slim's usurpation - as calculated by a Mexican financial website - of Gates (a relative hardship case with only $56 billion) can be seen as a reassuring triumph of the old economy over the new.

The burly Mexican operates in the manner of the capitalist barons of yore; building monopolistic stakes in the kind of mostly dull, dependable enterprises people have little choice but to spend their money with.

"I don't even use a computer," he has said. "My kids once gave me a laptop, but all I could do was switch it on and off."

Despite the murmurings, there has been little real suggestion of dodginess in Slim's dealings. Business rivals, Left-wing journalists and lobby groups have been looking for years for evidence of graft. Nothing has stuck.

Which leaves him with the problem of what to spend it all on. He has a fondness for Rodin sculptures and Impressionist paintings, and a lifelong passion for Cohiba cigars, but otherwise lives modestly, dressed in baggy suits and often sporting a plastic watch, in Lomas de Chapultepec, a well-to-do northern suburb of the capital.

He voices scepticism for the fashion embraced by Gates and the legendary US investor Warren Buffett (struggling by in third place on $52 billion) for giving away vast chunks of their fortunes.

Slim argues that running good businesses and helping economies to grow does more to help the poor than charitable donations. "I think you accomplish more by fixing things that aren't working than by giving," he says.

While this plays well to his carefully crafted I'm-no-softie image, it doesn't tell the whole story.

In recent years he has been quietly but dramatically increasing his charitable activities, funding, among other things, the supply of bicycles to help rural children get to school, and a programme to provide medical care for poor families.

One of his recent ideas was to site scores of hospitals close to the US border, to which Mexican migrant workers could travel for cheap operations. Slim, naturally, would award himself the building contract.